may deepen
in them the white may sink,
it can then be constant, as music
is constant, or a marriage, or fountains,
or a palace whose shadow is constant.
To make an Elegy of Spain
is to make a song of the abyss.
It is to cut a gorge into one’s soul
which is suddenly no longer private.
This privacy which has become invaded
straightens itself up, it sings,
“I am proud as a cañon.”
Can you imagine the shock over the world
against which two enormous black rocks roll
this world that looks like a white cloud
shifting its buttocks?
When the guitar strikes
A procession of those tasters of ecstasy
the thieves of dark and light
beginning with Villon
whose black songs are elegies
whose elegies are white
Dios!
The Open Skies
I
Molluscs in their shell
the skies
Breathe up and down
unspiraling
Open skies
seeded with light and stone
II
Pattern of drift Is eye of air
stray ephemeral visible hand from sky form?
III
Revolving day prisoner in the openness
Smiling lips daylight fair
unbreakable you seem
Hitched to me as I
window thrust to you
IV
Cloudless
you take
My happiness
rising in the morning
Light descends to me
buoyantly I stare
A tremor on this hand
light has touched
I pass into your frailness
Noiseless hour
span of float and flight
Sky without lever or stress
V
Tough the cone to shelter
Ecstatic harking to upward dome
VI
Ash and ember
creature and skin
Soft body of unprotected gilt
VII
Sky whose fancy
sways and swings above
All quick airiness
and slow guide
Without you I cannot see.
Hurricane
The house. The pictures there on the wall
and the rug I slept on it as a child
near the dining table, drowned while they ate.
Now a threat, a dawn of horse hooves, a manger
where the straw is blown and hens in the yard,
their tail feathers high, and cat with open eyes.
I wonder before it strikes from the low clouds, I
not yet to bed near the steps where leaves lie,
how far the water will rise?
If the storm only a few miles from here,
if its white cheek and wet arm,
its eyelash curled
and its wrist angry and at last free
will touch this house, will caress
the old furniture and names erase them,
if the roof, all the chambers
will be lifted from our faces, will we
go gladly into its barn, magnified by wet
and rain and drops that slope
increasingly to that eave where we wait
for darkness, or thunder, or night
on the drenched tile
to lead us away?
His Jungle
Recognized only its hands
That monkey face is known later
and the wind accompanying it.
Torrents replace the usual seasons
conquest by variety
A handsome thunder, a thaw
Out of the earth comes another air
smoky as animal.
He lifts his hands to his face.
The stone he must roll it.
He must rub the flakes without
Being shaken.
He must break down the door
Behind it.
That tree how many leaves
Strain it. He wonders
If a four-legged beast
Will find the flower
And eat it. Rather it than him.
If that place going round
Beyond the trees if the door’s most
Difficult inscription will be lost
In the whirl
Will escape him.
Will be too mashed will remind
Him of mold will have gone
Too far and he dislike
Black as he fears green,
A chatter in the grass,
Wind replacing ivory
With a tusk makes him drop
His tools.
It is the headsman,
Earth’s fragile runner who is caught
In his trap who describing pain
Plaits a monkey face
Arc and area wide enough
For both to fire.
Timor Mortis, Florida
White foam tide
waves descending
line of blue and white
blue submarine
where the dark sweel of thrust